Kate played in New York as Juliet and Lady Macbeth, and in 1863 had a great success in London as Leah in Augustin Daly’s adaptation of Mosenthal’s Deborah. In 1866 she married George Crowe, but returned to the stage in 1868, playing later as Lady Macbeth with Henry Irving, and in 1875 in the title-part of Tennyson’s Queen Mary. When her mother opened the Sadler’s Wells theatre in 1879 Miss Bateman appeared as Helen Macgregor in Rob Roy, and in 1881 as Margaret Field in Henry Arthur Jones’ His Wife. Her daughter, Sidney Crowe (b. 1871), also became an actress. Virginia Bateman (b. 1854), a younger sister of Kate, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, went on the stage as a child, and first appeared in London in the title-part of her mother’s play, Fanchette, in 1871. She created a number of important parts during several seasons at the Lyceum and elsewhere. She married Edward Compton the actor. Another sister was Isabel (b. 1854), well known on the London stage.
BATEMENT LIGHTS, in architecture the lights in the upper part of a perpendicular window, abated, or only half the width of those below.
BATES, HARRY (1850–1899), British sculptor, was born at Stevenage, Herts, on the 26th of April 1850. He began his career as a carver’s assistant, and before beginning the regular study of plastic art he passed through a long apprenticeship in architectural decoration. In 1879 he came to London and entered the Lambeth School of Art, studying under Jules Dalou and Rodin, and winning a silver medal in the national competition at South Kensington. In 1881 he was admitted to the Royal Academy schools, where in 1883 he won the gold medal and the travelling scholarship of £200 with his relief of “Socrates teaching the People in the Agora,” which showed grace of line and harmony of composition. He then went to Paris and studied under Rodin. A head and three small bronze panels (the “Odyssey,”) executed by Bates in Paris, were exhibited at the Royal Academy, and selected for purchase by the Chantrey trustees; but the selection had to be cancelled because they had not been modelled in England. His “Aeneas” (1885), “Homer” (1886), three “Psyche” panels and “Rhodope” (1887) all showed marked advance in form and dignity; and in 1892, after the exhibition of his vigorously designed “Hounds in Leash,” Bates was elected A.R.A. This and his “Pandora,” in marble and ivory, which was bought in the same year for the Chantrey Bequest, are now in the Tate Gallery. The portrait-busts of Harry Bates are good pieces of realism—strong, yet delicate in technique, and excellent in character. His statues have a picturesqueness in which the refinement of the sculptor is always felt. Among the chief of these are the fanciful “Maharaja of Mysore,” somewhat overladen with ornament, and the colossal equestrian statue of Lord Roberts (1896) upon its important pedestal, girdled with a frieze of figures, now set up in Calcutta, and a statue of Queen Victoria for Dundee. But perhaps his masterpiece, showing the sculptor’s delicate fancy and skill in composition, was an allegorical presentment of “Love and Life”—a winged male figure in bronze, with a female figure in ivory being crowned by the male. Bates died in London on the 30th of January 1899, his premature death robbing English plastic art of its most promising representative at the time. (See Sculpture.)
BATES, HENRY WALTER (1825–1892), English naturalist and explorer, was born at Leicester on the 8th of February 1825. His father, a manufacturing hosier, intended him for business, and for a time the son yielded to his wishes, escaping as often as he could into the neighbouring country to gratify his love of botany and entomology. In 1844 he met a congenial spirit in Alfred Russel Wallace, and the result was discussion and execution of a plan to explore some then little-known region of the globe. The banks of the Amazons was the district chosen, and in April 1848 the two friends sailed in a trader for Pará. They had little or no money, but hoped to meet their expenses by the sale of duplicate specimens. After two years Bates and Wallace agreed to collect independently, Wallace taking the Rio Negro and the upper waters of the Orinoco, while Bates continued his route up the great river for 1400 m. He remained in the country eleven years, during which time he collected no fewer than 8000 species of insects new to science. His long residence in the tropics, with the privations which it entailed, undermined his health. Nor had the exile from home the compensation of freeing him from financial cares, which hung heavy on him till he had the good fortune to be appointed in 1864 assistant-secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a post which, to the inestimable gain of the society, and the advantage of a succession of explorers, to whom he was alike Nestor and Mentor, he retained till his death on the 16th of February 1892. Bates is best known as the author of one of the most delightful books of travel in the English language, The Naturalist on the Amazons (1863), the writing of which, as the correspondence between the two has shown, was due to Charles Darwin’s persistent urgency. “Bates,” wrote Darwin to Sir Charles Lyell, “is second only to Humboldt in describing a tropical forest.” But his most memorable contribution to biological science, and more especially to that branch of it which deals with the agencies of modification of organisms, was his paper on the “Insect Fauna of the Amazon Valley,” read before the Linnaean Society in 1861. He therein, as Darwin testified, clearly stated and solved the problem of “mimicry,” or the superficial resemblances between totally different species and the likeness between an animal and its surroundings, whereby it evades its foes or conceals itself from its prey. Bates’s other contributions to the literature of science and travel were sparse and fugitive, but he edited for several years a periodical of Illustrated Travels. A man of varied tastes, he devoted the larger part of his leisure to entomology, notably to the classification of coleoptera. Of these he left an extensive and unique collection, which, fortunately for science, was purchased intact by René Oberthur of Rennes.
BATES, JOHN. A famous case in English constitutional history, tried before the court of exchequer in November 1606, arose out of the refusal of a merchant of the Levant Company, John Bates, to pay an extra duty of 5s. per cwt. on imported currants levied by the sole authority of the crown in addition to the 2s. 6d. granted by the Statute of Tonnage and Poundage, on the ground that such an imposition was illegal without the sanction of parliament. The unanimous decision of the four barons of the exchequer in favour of the crown threatened to establish a precedent which, in view of the rapidly increasing foreign trade, would have made the king independent of parliament. The judgments of Chief Baron Fleming and Baron Clark are preserved. The first declares that “the king’s power is double, ordinary and absolute, and they have several laws and ends. That of the ordinary is for the profit of particular subjects, for the execution of civil justice . . . in the ordinary courts, and by the civilians is nominated jus privatum, and with us common law; and these laws cannot be changed without parliament. . . . The absolute power of the king is not that which is converted or executed to private uses to the benefit of particular persons, but is only that which is applied to the general benefit of the people and is salus populi; and this power is not guided by the rules which direct only at the common law, and is most properly named policy or government; and as the constitution of this body varieth with the time, so varieth this absolute law, according to the wisdom of the king, for the common good; and these being general rules, and true as they are, all things done within these rules are lawful. The matter in question is material matter of state, and ought to be ruled by the rules of policy, and if it be so, the king hath done well to execute his extraordinary power. All customs (i.e. duties levied at the ports), be they old or new, are no other but the effects and issues of trades and commerce with foreign nations; but all commerce and affairs with foreigners, all wars and peace, all acceptance and admitting for foreign current coin, all parties and treaties whatsoever are made by the absolute power of the king; and he who hath power of causes hath power also of effects.” Baron Clark, in his judgment, concurred, declaring that the seaports were the king’s ports, and that, since foreign merchants were admitted to them only by leave of the crown, the crown possessed also the right of fixing the conditions under which they should be admitted, including the imposition of a money payment. Incidentally, Baron Clark, in reply to the argument that
